Why this site exists

What it does

Most holiday calendars show you a grid of dates and stop there. The useful question is not when is Diwali — it is which leave days are worth spending, and that depends on which weekday each holiday lands on.

2026 has nine long weekends that cost no leave at all, because the holiday falls on a Friday or a Monday. Spend a single leave day and 22 four-day breaks open up across 13 different festivals. The calculator finds these for you and sorts them by how soon they arrive, so you can book the next one rather than reading a list of dates that have passed.

Where the dates come from

India and the United States are transcribed from official notifications, not aggregated from other calendar sites:

• the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) gazetted holiday list for central government offices
• the Reserve Bank of India list under section 25 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, which is what banks actually close for
• the U.S. Office of Personnel Management federal holiday schedule, which states each holiday on the date it is actually observed

The other 45 countries are compiled from Google’s published public-holiday calendars and cross-checked against Nager.Date, with every disagreement between the two reviewed by hand before it ships. The compiler lives in the repository rather than in someone’s notes, so each list can be regenerated the moment a government publishes its next year.

Every list is the nationwide one. This is a country-level planner: it does not carry sub-national calendars for anywhere, including India. Where a country’s holidays genuinely vary from one part of it to another, a day is included when it is observed across most of the country and left out when it is not — so the calendar you get is the one a national employer would publish, and your own office list is the thing that will differ. That is what the office holiday optimizer is for.

Dates set by lunar observation — Eid, Diwali, Vesak, Nyepi — can move by a day even after a government publishes them, and a few national notifications land only weeks ahead. Indonesia’s 2027 is an estimate for exactly that reason: the decree that fixes it is not out yet. If you spot a date that has moved, tell us — it is the single most useful thing you can report. The country list says which calendars carry sighting-dependent dates.

How the maths works

For a given number of leave days, the solver walks the calendar looking for runs of consecutive days off, treating your weekend, the public holidays for your region, and the leave you are willing to spend as one continuous block. Two rules keep the results honest:

• Every plan must contain a real holiday. Taking Friday and Monday off around an ordinary weekend is not a long weekend, it is four days of leave.
• A plan must return at least 1.3 days off per leave day spent. Below that you are not bridging a gap, you are just taking leave, and the tool has nothing to add.

Results are then ranked by how soon they start, not by how long they are. A spectacular 18-day break next March is no use to someone deciding what to do in three weeks.

Weekends are not the same everywhere

Which days a country rests on changes every answer on the page, so the solver uses each country’s own rather than assuming Saturday and Sunday. Israel works Sunday to Thursday and rests Friday and Saturday; Egypt does the same. On those calendars a holiday landing on a Sunday is a real day off rather than one the weekend had already swallowed — get that wrong and every result is shifted by two days.

Separately, a large share of Indian workplaces run Monday to Saturday. The work-week switch in the header re-solves the whole calendar for a six-day week rather than adjusting the display: a Saturday holiday becomes a real day off, and Friday holidays stop producing three-day weekends.

Your office holiday list

Most companies publish their own list, which overlaps the gazette but is never identical. The office holiday optimizer takes that list — pasted as text, or as a PDF or image — reads the dates out of it, and runs the same solver against your actual holidays.

The parsing happens in your browser. Your company's holiday list is not uploaded anywhere, which is both a privacy property and the reason the feature works without an account. There is more detail in the privacy policy.

What it does not do

Worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It covers 2026 and 2027, plus the first days of January 2028 so that a New Year bridge can be calculated. It stops there.
• It works at country level only. Every calendar here is the national one, so wherever a country’s holidays vary internally you may get days this does not know about — and it may show one you do not get.
• China’s make-up workdays are not modelled. Golden Week is paid for by turning a neighbouring weekend into working days, and that swap is published separately each autumn.
• Restricted or optional holidays are not modelled. Those vary per employer and are usually the interesting ones, which is what the office optimizer is for.
• It does not know your leave balance, your team's blackout dates, or whether your manager will approve anything.
• It is not a booking site and has no commercial relationship with any airline or hotel.

Who runs it

An independent project, built and maintained by one person in India — which is why India is the calendar with the most care in it, and why corrections for the other 46 are especially welcome. There is no company behind it, no sign-up, no newsletter and no advertising. If it is useful, the best thanks is to send a correction when a date is wrong — the address is on the contact page.